Thursday, 13 August 2026

 Wayne FARNHAM (Narracan) (17:32): (1787) My adjournment tonight is for the Minister for Planning, and the action I seek is that the minister take immediate action to prevent the destruction of rural and regional prime agricultural land, particularly around the BESS developments in my electorate. I have brought this up, I think, three or four times this year. I still have not had an answer to this question. The problem I have got is that these BESS projects – battery energy storage systems ‍– are going on prime agricultural land in my community, but there is no community consultation. There is a tick-and-flick system that the providers – the people doing the development – use. They will do a meeting in a town hall and go, ‘Yep, that’s community consultation,’ and move on. But it is not. With these projects, especially the Samsung project out at Shady Creek, which is placed in the middle of two bushfire overlays, the minister actually has the power to remove those overlays, and that is frightening for my community and not fair on the community. Developments like this should go back to local council. That is our position on it. Local councils should do the community consultation and then decide what is best for their community, not someone in Spring Street just jamming these things through. I know these applications are in and have been submitted, and my community, rightly so, is very, very concerned now because they know they have no power. All the power lies with the minister.

I have asked several times for the minister to respond. I would be more than happy to have a cup of coffee with the minister out the back and talk to her about these issues. But it is not just in my community. We see it out in the west with VNI West being jammed through communities. This is what is happening: the government is riding roughshod over rural communities. It is cutting them out of having a say in what happens in their community, and that is not fair on any community. I am nearly to the point of pleading with the minister to consult with me, to have a conversation with me and have a conversation with the locals to see what they actually want, because these things are popping up all over regional Victoria. I have got five BESS projects in my electorate now and none of them are in a renewable energy zone. That is why the zones were set up, so why isn’t the infrastructure put in those zones? You cannot keep taking up prime farmland in this state. We still have to feed people. We still have to produce milk, and if the government keep putting these across this state with no community consultation, well, they are taking up farmland that could be feeding people. I ask the minister to get in contact with me urgently.